The US is the
closest it’s ever been to breaking the 240-year male stronghold on
the presidency. Though American women have made some political gains
during that period, there has only been one woman so far with a real
chance of smashing that glass ceiling: Hillary Clinton.

And yet some women,
especially young women, have greeted Clinton’s historic candidacy
with muted enthusiasm.

“I want there to
be a woman president, of course,” said Maria Alcivar, a graduate
student at Iowa State University and reluctant Clinton supporter. “I
just don’t see why it had to be her.”

Across the country
over the last 18 months, several women have expressed similar
sentiments: a wish that the potential first female leader was someone
less flawed and less polarizing.

Because women have
higher and harder barriers to clear, the women that win need to
exceed expectations

Adrienne Kimmell,
Barbara Lee Family Foundation

Experts say there is
no predictable route to the presidency for a female candidate, not
least because the trail is still being blazed. But there is a case to
be made that the first woman to get this close to the presidency
would probably look a lot like Clinton: a nationally recognizable
figure with an extensive résumé and close proximity to power.

“There’s a
saying, the first into battle needs to wear the most armor,” said
Adrienne Kimmell, executive director of the Barbara Lee Family
Foundation, which studies women running for executive office.

She continued:
“Because women have higher and harder barriers to clear the path to
executive office, the women that win need to exceed expectations –
so by comparison they tend to be more qualified than their
opponents.”

A 2011 study
identified what the researchers called the “Jackie (and Jill)
Robinson effect”, a reference to the first African American player
in Major League Baseball. Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier
in 1947 and by no coincidence, according to the theory, he remains
one of the best players of all time.

The study found that
female lawmakers outperform their male colleagues, introducing more
legislation and delivering more financial projects to their home
districts. This, the researchers suggest, is the result of underlying
gender discrimination, which narrows the prospective pool of female
candidates down to only the most qualified, talented and politically
ambitious.

“One of the
reasons it’s taking so long to elect a woman president is because
very few women have actually run for president,” said Jennifer
Lawless, the director of the Women & Politics Institute at
American University. The first may have been Victoria Woodhull in
1872, nearly 50 years before women won the vote, and 136 years before
Clinton’s first competitive campaign in 2008.

The gender gap
leaves a very narrow pipeline to the top, Lawless said. The most
common route to the US presidency is through the Senate or a
governor’s mansion, which greatly narrows the pool of prospective
female candidates, since there are currently only 20 women serving in
the 100-strong US Senate, 84 congresswomen (19%) and six female
governors.

Patricia Schroeder,
a former Democratic congresswoman from Colorado who briefly ran for
the Democratic nomination in 1987, has spent a lot of time over the
last 18 months thinking about what has changed for women since she
first entered Congress in 1973.

“Sexism is a lot
harder to pinpoint than it was but it’s clearly still there,” she
said.

When Schroeder first
arrived in Congress she faced questions from her male colleagues
about how she managed to raise two small children while being a
lawmaker. On one occasion she snapped back: “I have a brain and a
uterus and I use both.” She was also advised never to wear green.
It apparently was not a power color.

Research shows that
women who run for elective office win at comparable rates to men.
Party trumps gender at the ballot box. That is to say, male and
female voters overwhelmingly support their party’s candidate,
regardless of gender.

In an analysis of
2010 House races, female candidates received as many votes as male
candidates of the same seat status (incumbent, open seat,
challenger), according to a study by Kathleen Dolan published in her
2014 book, When Does Gender Matter? Women Candidates and Gender
Stereotypes in American Elections.

And yet women
seeking to run for office still encounter barriers their male
counterparts do not. Studies show they are less likely to express
interest in a political career and more likely to doubt their ability
to run. Women are less likely to put themselves forward and need to
be recruited to run for office, research suggests.

Ivy Taylor, the
mayor of San Antonio, said she did not start her career expecting to
run for public office. After encouragement from her husband and
community leaders she decided to try for a seat on the city council
in 2009.

“I felt qualified
but not ready, if that makes sense,” Taylor said of her decision to
run. “It took some time for me to get used to the idea because I
didn’t think of myself as a politician but then I came to
understand that elected office was an extension of my commitment to
working with people in order to create a better future.”

Taylor is one of
only 19 big city mayors, according to a 2016 report by the CUNY
Institute for State and Local Governance of the 100 largest US
cities. Of the top 15, only San Antonio has a female mayor.

Experts and
political groups involved in recruiting women to elective office say
that having a female president – whoever she is – will open doors
for women at every level of government, regardless of party. In some
cases, even the prospect of a Clinton presidency has already helped.

“It is not a
coincidence that we have a record number of Democratic women running
in competitive Senate races in the same year we have Hillary Clinton
at the top of the ticket,” according to Muthoni Wambu Kraal, the
senior director for state and local campaigns at Emily’s List,
which has been helping elect pro-choice women since 1985. “She was
a powerful recruitment tool.”